


Fic Promptly: Thicker Than Water

by AellaIrene



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen, Nasty Implications, Time Period: Reign of Yuri Vorbarra, Time Period: Yuri Vorbarra's Civil War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-10
Updated: 2011-06-10
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:39:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/pseuds/AellaIrene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Any, Vorkosigan Saga, loyal beyond sense. <i>He is her brother</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Fic Promptly: Thicker Than Water

He is her brother.

Constantia knows what Ezar is saying-- he is nowhere near as good a propagandist as she was, even at the beginning, but then, he served his apprenticeship cutting throats with Piotr Vorkosigan, and she learnt at the knee of her mother, and of her aunts, learnt from Piotr's mother Claudine, when she looked at the pictures of her dead and gutted daughter, and turned them into the last service Polina could ever give-- that Yuri is mad. That power turned his brain. That he is sleeping with her, and that is why it took his wife five years to get with child (he doesn't say if Yuri rapes her or not. Ezar does like to keep his options open). Even their own people murmur that, Emperor or not, perhaps--

And so Constantia goes and persuades Yuri to come out, to show himself, reminding them who they are fighting for, of the charismatic young man who once brought the Council of Counts to their feet with a well placed phrase, who could make the hills and valleys ring with cheers as he told them to wait, that the time would come when they would sweep the Cetagandans from the planet, and make of their ships and installations a funeral pyre for all the Barrayans who died, from his half-sister's husband the Count Vordarian, to their siblings, to the lowliest prole.

Yuri won that war for them, and Constantia laughs, alone at night, to hear them say that he went mad afterwards.

Yuri was mad before they even reached twenty five, by her reckoning. It is just that they cannot hide it anymore, that Constantia cannot cover for the lapses of memory, for the sudden certainty that this is all a trick, a Cetagandan trick, that he will wake again and be in their labs, trapped like a rat. Two nights ago, they sat awake all night as he had every piece of panelling in their rooms stripped to check for creatures in the walls, until Dono designed a Palace that would defeat that trick.

But still, when she says "Yuri", he _listens_. He _sees her_ , the way almost no one yet living still can. And that means that her brother is still there, beyond it all.

And so she is bound.


End file.
